Monthly Archives: July 2013

Adnan Al-Wazzan received his B.A. in English Language and Arts from King Abdulaziz University in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, Arabic, and French) from Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1981. He pursued post-doctoral research in Edinburgh in 1991. He also spent several sabbatical leaves pursuing Islamic Sharia studies at the hands of senior Islamic scholars in Makkah Al-Mukarramah.

Professor Al-Wazzan’s academic pursuit extended nearly three decades, during which, he rose through academic ranks to full professorship of Comparative English Literature in the Department of English at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah. During this period, he was also entrusted with several academic and administrative responsibilities. He was the Dean of University Studies for Women and the Director of the Research Center for Social Studies at the Research Institute of Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah. He also served as an Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Endowments, Guidance and Da’wa and Advisor to the Minister, and a Member of the Council of Saudi Arabian General Commission for Tourism and Monuments. Between 2006-2008, he was appointed to the Saudi Arabian Consultative Council, and between 2007-2009, he was appointed as a Rector of Umm Al-Qura University. He was also appointed as a part-time council member of the Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Commission.

Professor Al-Wazzan mentored several Master’s and Ph.D. students in Saudi Universities and participated in conferences and symposia in his field of specialization, both in Saudi Arabia and internationally. He was a visiting professor of comparative literature at Michigan State University, USA and at some Colleges and Universities in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. He is a member of several societies and literary associations including the British Comparative Literature Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the International Advisory Commission of the Markfield Institute for Higher Education in Islamic Studies in Bournemouth University.

Professor Al-Wazzan published many papers and books on different aspects of comparative literature, as well as a series of studies related to human rights in Islam. One of his major contributions in the latter field is his highly authoritative Arabic Encyclopedia of human rights in Islam and its attributes in Saudi Arabia. This scholarly and thoroughly research, 8-volume text is based on extensive resources from Islamic jurisprudence and contemporary human rights studies and reflects Professor Al-Wazzan’s experience and profundity in the field of human rights in Islam and his ability to present his work in a comprehensive and well-documented manner. The book discusses issues ranging from labor rights, rights of Muslims and Non-Muslims in the Islamic society, children’s rights, and women’s rights.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Muhammad Bakhit obtained a Diploma in Education and a B.A. in History in 1963, an M.A. in Islamic History in 1965 from the American University in Beirut (AUB), and a Ph.D. in Islamic History from School of Oriental and African Studies at London University in 1965. His academic career spans nearly half a century. Between 1963-1966, he was a research assistant at AUB. In 1966, he joined the Jordanian University Faculty of Arts, becoming full professor of history in 1983. He also spent an academic semester as a Visiting Researcher at Princeton University (1977-1978). During his tenure at the Jordanian University, Professor Bakhit Al-Sheyyab has also held several academic and administrative positions. He was the Dean for Scientific Research (1984-1989), the Chairman of the Translation Committee (1984-1989), the Acting Director of the Center for Strategic Studies (1985-1989), the Vice-Rector for Planning and Community Service (1989-1990), the Vice-Rector for Faculties of Humanities (1990-1991) and the Rector of Mu’tah University (1991-1993). Between 1993-2001, he founded Al-Albayt University and served as its Rector. He also founded and Chaired the Documents and Manuscripts Center and the Bilad al-Sham Conference at the Jordanian University.

Professor Bakhit Al-Sheyyab is a member of many national and international committees and humanitarian institutions and was a chief editor of Al-Nadwa, published by the Foreign Affairs Society, Dirasat, published by the Jordanian University, The Jordanian Journal of History and Archaeology, and a Chairman of the UNESCO’s Committee which produced the 4th volume of History of Humanity (from 7th to 14th Century A.D.). He is a Member of the Jordanian Arabic Language Academy, a Corresponding Member of the Syrian Arabic Language Academy, and a Member of the Executive Committee of the Royal Academy of Islamic History Research (Al-Albait Foundation) in Amman, Jordan.

Professor Bakhit Al-Sheyyab’s profundity and depth of knowledge are reflected in his publications and contributions to numerous national and international conferences; of particular importance is his 3-volumed book Studies into the History of Bilad Al-Sham (today’s Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon)

Professor Mohammad Bakhit was a recipient of the Golden Medal from the Jordanian University in 1987, the Jordanian Order of Independence (First Class) in 1990, the Jordanian Appreciation Prize in social science in 1992, the Al-Hussain Order for excellence (First Class) in 2008, and the Order of the French Ministry of Culture in 2009; alongside other awards, orders, and certificates from Jordan and other countries for his cultural and scientific contributions.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Halil Inalcik studied at Balıkesir Teacher Training School and graduated from the Department of History at the Faculty of Letters in Ankara University in 1940. He completed his PhD at Ankara University in 1943 on the Bulgarian question in the late Ottoman Empire. He was appointed an Assistant at the Department of History at Ankara University and became an Assistant Professor in 1946 and a full professor in 1952. He taught at both the Faculty of Letters and the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University.

Between 1972 and 1993, Professor Inalcik taught Ottoman history at the University of Chicago. In 1994, he returned to Turkey and founded the History Department and the Halil Inalcik Center for Ottoman Studies at Bilkent University, where he taught. He also served as a Visiting Professor of Ottoman History at Columbia University 1953-1954, Princeton University 1967-1992, and the University of Pennsylvania in the USA. In 1993, he donated his valuable collection on Ottoman History and related topics to Bilkent University Library, where it is now housed in a special room in the Library.

Professor Inalcik was an internationally acclaimed authority in Ottoman History. His deep knowledge and insightfulness are reflected in his numerous papers and books, including his book An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, which constitutes the pinnacle of his research over six decades and establishes his new school of thought, independently of the centrist European approach to studying Ottoman history. His inferences, based on reliable, original and richly documented sources, have influenced many scholars of social and economic aspects of Ottoman history.

Professor Inalcik’s outstanding contributions have been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including the Medal of Distinguished Service from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1991, and the Medal of Distinguished Service from the Romanian Embassy in Ankara. He was a Member of the Turkish Historical Society, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Historical Sciences) and the Institute of Turkish Studies. He was also a Corresponding Member of The British Academy and an Honorary Member of the Turkish Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Historical Association, the Albanian Academy of Sciences, the Nicola Lorga Historical Institute in Bucharest, Titutescu, and the Middle East Studies Association of America and Canada. Besides, he was a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society, London and Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London. His other awards include a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Research Center For Islamic History, Art and Culture award (Organization of Islamic Conference), Professor Mustafa Parlar Education and Research Foundation award (Middle East Technical University in Ankara) and Best Work in Social Sciences award from Sedat Simavi Foundation in Istanbul.

Professor Inalcik was a member of the High Council of the Atatürk Foundation of Turkish Culture and History. In 1979, he served as a Visiting Director d’Etudes assoicé á 1’ ecole der Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and between 1971-1974, he was elected President of the Association International des Etudes du Sud-Est European Studies, Turkish Historical Society, Ankara. He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from several universities including: Boğaziçi University (İstanbul), Selçuk Üniversitesi (Konya), University of Athens, University of Bucharest, Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and Uludağ University (Bursa). He had also been a co-editor of Archivum Otomanicum (Ottoman Archives), Journal of Ottoman Studies and History of The Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, UNESCO (Vol. V), and a member of the editorial boards of Turcica (Paris), Harvard Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge), Belgeler (Ankara), East European Quarterly (Boulder), Studia Islamica (Paris) and Islamic Studies (Islamabad).

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Abdesselam Cheddadi was educated in France, earning a doctorate degree in arts and humanities from the University of Paris. From 1980 to 1998, he served as a professor in the Department of History at the Faculty of Education, Mohammed V University, and held the chair of professor at the University Research Institute in that Department from 1998 to the present. He is a former Associate Head of Postgraduate Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudesen Sciences Sociales in 1985, and an Associate Professor of Philosophy in 1986 at the University of Paris. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Princeton university in 1994 and Harvard university in 1998, and a Fulbright Fellow at Yale University in 2002. He is the President of the Moroccan Cultural Institute and a member of the Moroccan Society for History Research, the International Society for History, Sciences and Philosophy and the Arab World Research Group at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences. He is a member of the Permanent Committee for Programs of the Moroccan Ministry of Education and an associate member of the National Research Council at Mohammed V University.

Professor Cheddadi is a renowned Arab scholar of Islamic historiography and translation. A specialist in Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Cheddadi published numerous books, research articles, translations and editions dealing with the thought, philosophy, and biography of this legendary Muslim thinker. In his editions of Ibn Khaldun, particularly the Mugaddimah, Cheddadi carefully reviewed all available manuscripts across the world. Among Ibn Khaldun’s books translated by Cheddadi from Arabic to French are: Le Voyage d’Occident et d’Orient [The Journey to West and East], Peuples et nations du monde I – Extraits des “Ibar” (Le Livre des exemples) [The World’s People and Nations I: Extracts from “Ibar” [The Book of Examples]; Le Livre des Exemples I: Autobiographie, Muqaddima [The Book of Examples: Autobiography, Muqaddimah] (This book has been translated into English) and Le Livre des Exemples II [The Book of Examples: The History of the Maghreb and Other Texts].

Professor Cheddadi also authored several other books and articles in French, English, and Arabic, highlighting Ibn Khaldun’s social, political, anthropological, and historical conceptions and comparing his ideas with modern theories. His books include: Ibn Khaldun Revisite [Ibn Khaldun Revisited] Ibn Khaldûn: L’homme et le théoricien de la civilization [Ibn Khaldun: a Man and Theoretician of Civilization], and Actualite d’Ibn Khaldun. In addition to his writings on Ibn Khaldun’s works, Cheddadi also wrote on other diverse issues pertaining to Islamic historiography and the cultural and political history of the Maghreb. This is exemplified by his books: Les Arabes et l’appropriation De L’histoire: Émergence et premiers développements de l’historiographie musulmane jusqu’au Il-VIIIe siècle [The Arabs and Appropriation of History: Emergence of Major Developments in Islamic Historiography]; La Littérature arabe médiévale [History of Medieval Arabic Literature] jointly with Andras Hamori, and Pensée grecque, culture arabe: Le mouvement de traduction Gréco-arabe á Bagdad et la société abbasside primitive [Greek Thought and Arab Culture: The translation Movement from Greek to Arabic in Baghdad During the Early Abbasid Era] jointly with Dimitri Gustas. He also translated a number of texts from English to Arabic.

Through his writings in Arabic, French, and English, Professor Cheddadi was able to address a wide international audience. His scholarship and erudition, especially with respect to Ibn Khaldun, has enriched our knowledge about one of humanity’s greatest thinkers and has made many of Cheddadi’s books indispensable references nationally and internationally for researchers and students of the Islamic concept of Imran.

Cheddadi’s contributions are evident in numerous publications on various aspects of the thought of Ibn Khaldun and particularly in his book: Ibn KhaldUn: L’homme et le théoricien de La civilization.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Roshdi Rashed is a world-renowned historian of science and currently an Honorary Distinguished Class Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His seminal contributions to the history, applications, and development of sciences and mathematics at the hands of ancient Muslim scholars appeared in more than 40 books and 120 scholarly articles. He also initiated and supervised two Encyclopedias of the history of sciences in Islam.

Professor Rashed conducted ground-breaking studies on the probability theory and its applications to social sciences. He also studied the role of mathematics in the experimental optics of Ibn al-Haytham and his successors, and discovered the manuscripts of Al-Ala Ibn Sahl, which embodied the theory of lenses and dioptrics long before European scientists of the 16th century. These findings led him to new insights into the contributions of Ibn Al-Haytham and Kamãl Al-Din Al-Färisi to dioptrics and the Rainbow theory, respectively. He also edited, commented and translated into French all Arabic translations of ancient Greek works in mathematics (most of which were lost in Greek), as well as several previously unknown works of Muslim mathematicians of the 9th Century. These endeavors along with his discovery of four Arabic translations of Diophantus’ Arithmetica – lost in Greek – stimulated his research into the history of diophantine analysis. He studied Diophantus’s underlying algorithms, and was able, by using tools of modern algebraic geometry, to determine the latent methods of Diophantus, and thereby shed new light into the works of later mathematicians like al-Khujandi and al-Khäzin — who invented the integer diophantine analysis — and subsequently Bachet, Fermat, Euler and Lagrange. Professor Rashed also studied a hitherto unknown text of Lagrange on Diophantus and discovered many other texts that enabled him to reconstruct the history of the theory of numbers, showing for instance that the first studies on elementary arithmetical functions were accomplished before 1320 A.D. and that attempts to prove Euler theorem on perfect numbers were due to Ibn al-Haytham. He also edited, translated, and commented on the works of Al-Tusi and Al-Khayyam. Professor Rashed’s enormous contributions were recognized by numerous prestigious awards and honorary degrees.

Professor Rashed has authored around 60 books and more than 100 scholarly articles in addition to his translation of some important relevant texts from ancient languages. His methodology and the originality and depth of his works have earned him respect both in the Arab world and internationally. He is particularly recognized for his illustrious, six-volume book on the history of Arab contributions to science, and his four-volume book on analytical mathematics between the third and fifth Hejira centuries.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.